this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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You're almost certainly right about that and I have no idea why nobody is seriously talking about this, probably because you gotta keep the "China bad" narrative going.
There's even proof: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science-idUSKBN23X2HQ
https://theconversation.com/was-coronavirus-really-in-europe-in-march-2019-141582
I also have friends that picked up what appeared like a nasty flu in the US around summer 2019.
I thinl the "China bad" playes a huge role in this also. The way it has mutated and spread in deer is a sign that it well could have come from somewhere like fur farms in Europe. And they did find traces like your link states.
The way it started to spread in deer and how my countrys food safety organizations right away went "we are not tracking this, we won't start, there is no point". The way they refuse to track it in domestic animals or fur animals. The way they refuse to shut those fur farms here even now with bird flu. The attitude to pathogen prevention is pretty clear in neolib public health.
Pretty sure it could have easily spread from a country like Finland that has no working surveillance for anything like this, that does it's "healthcare" by prescribing sick people flu meds and sending them home often without ever seeing them before or aftrr, there are no family doctors anymore. All this imo could play a part in just missing it.
And talking about discourse, media and awareness. Now, when wastewater is high everywhere and people are getting very sick again, but the majority is pretending "it's over", it indeed looks over for the average person and even for the healthcare folks. And it's everywhere. There is no "signs" to pick up by the average person that there is a plague around, but people are still dying. We don't see it now, we would not have seen it then.
Maybe it showed up in these weird illnesses like mine that nobody wanted to/had resources to really investigate. One younger doctor found my case so odd after I landed in the ER that he asked to follow it up in my records later to see what it is I had, but nobody did a full diagnosis so in the end they found nothing. It's a long story but I can clearly see where it went to hell, they should have listened to the patient for one.
Maybe a few people got it sooner, got so sick they were forced to stay home (I did for weeks) so it was not spreading as fast yet. Socially it's no different to now.
Also the way even the newer fast spreading waves take time to really pick up to me says that same thing had to happen then too and it probably took longer as it spread less and slower then. Now the framong is that it just sort of supposedly showed up in a few months and caused that big wave.
My theory is that it was here way sooner and China was the only one responsible enough to call it out because they run their country from another pov that isn't 100% about keeping the machine going.
From what I understand the reason China spotted it was that people whose job was to look for sus patterns in hospital admissions noticed a weird cluster of pnuemonia cases. I guess Pnuemonia isn't supposed to happen in clusters like that? Either way, someone was like "We should take a look at this", phoned it up the hierarchy, and the decision makers sent people in a day or two later to start investigating. A week or two later they published the genome. If other regions weren't monitoring for unusual disease clusters, or missed signs, it's plausible that it was in other places already.